European Innovation Scoreboard

European Innovation Scoreboard

The European Innovation Scoreboard provides a comparative analysis of innovation performance in EU countries, other European countries, and regional neighbours. It assesses relative strengths and weaknesses of national innovation systems and helps countries identify areas they need to address. The European Innovation Scoreboard 2018 was released on 22 June 2018.

The Regional Innovation Scoreboard is a regional extension of the European Innovation Scoreboard, assessing the innovation performance of European regions based on a limited number of indicators. The latest edition of this two-yearly report was published in 2017.

In the spotlight

European Innovation Scoreboard 2018

The 2018 edition of the Scoreboard highlights that the EU's innovation performance continues to improve, that progress is accelerating, and that the outlook is positive. Since 2010, the EU's average innovation performance has increased by 5.8 percentage points, and it is expected to improve by an additional 6 percentage points over the next 2 years.

The EU continues to improve its position relative to the United States, Japan, and Canada. However, China is catching up at three times the EU's innovation performance growth rate. Within the EU, innovation performance increased in 18 countries and decreased in 10 countries since 2010. Sweden remains the EU innovation leader, followed by Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, the UK, and Luxembourg. Lithuania, the Netherlands, Malta, the UK, Latvia, and France are the fastest growing innovators.

The 2018 edition follows the methodology of the 2017 edition. However, results should not be compared across editions due to data revisions. Time series using the most recent data allow performance to be tracked over time.